WinNT on Abit BP6

[Moe]

Well, i've finally got my Dual Processor Abit BP6 box up and running smooth. I've been dying to try out SMP mode for a month! But I have one small problem, WindowsNT Workstation 4.0 refuses to install!

I've been pulling my hair out for about two days trying to get this thing to work with no success.

I already have win98se installed and have partitioned the drive for NT and Linux, and I am aiming for a triple boot system in the end.

Whenever I try and run WinNT setup it always ends up at a Blue screen with very small lettering saying that the Boot Device is Inaccessable. Then, it gives me huge stack dumps and hex addresses pointing to the kernel executable, which are meaningless to me.
I've attempted installation from the CD and the Hard Drive itself, both with and without the 3 diskettes it wants to make.

My config is as following.

Abit BP6 with two celeron 466s
256 Megs of RAM
Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI host adapter
Quantum Atlas 10k Drive w/ 2 FAT16 partitions
Plextor 8/20 CD-R drive

Any ideas, guidance would be greatly appreciated.

[Stan]

You might already know this but...

If you install NT from the CD on a PC with a AIC-7890 SCSI controller , as soon as the SCSI CDrom has been detected, you have to press F6. Then hold it untill you have the very 1st page of the NT wizard.
You need then to install (press S) the SCSI drivers, otherwise NT won't detect the HD and therefore won't find any media storage devices to copy/install the files.

Hope this helps a bit

Stan



[This message has been edited by Stan (edited 08-24-99).]

[Stan]

You might already know this, but...

If you install NT from the CD on a PC with a AIC-7890 SCSI controller , as soon as the SCSI CDrom has been detected, you have to press F6. Then hold it untill you have the very 1st page of the NT wizard.
You need then to install (press S) the SCSI drivers, otherwise NT won't detect the HD and therefore won't find any media storage devices to copy/install the files.

Hope this helps a bit

Stan



[This message has been edited by Stan (edited 08-24-99).]

[Stan]

Oops, sorry about the reply, but I had a "Internal Server Error" ...

[Moe]

Yes! Thank you Stan. WinNT didn't want to use the plain vanilla Adaptec2940 driver, so i did what you said and installed the 2940U2 drivers, and everything worked perfectly!

Thank you very much.

[Moe]

Well, NT is running quite smoothly, but now i have a different question.

Does dual booting between NT and 98SE cause any problems in 98? Sometimes (half the time) 98 won't load after rebooting from NT, and I have to go through safe mode and restart again.

Any ideas?

[Stan]

[deleted duplicated post]

[This message has been edited by Stan (edited 08-26-99).]

[Stan]

[deleted duplicated post]

[This message has been edited by Stan (edited 08-26-99).]

[Stan]

Hi Moe !

Glad to see that your system is working OK.

Re: dual boot.
I also set up my machine with 98 and NT, but unlike you, I've never had any problems.

If I understand your config, you have FAT16 partitions only ???
Have you installed 98 and NT on the same partiton ?

It is always recommended to separate the 2 OS. For ex, install 98 on the 1st partiton using FAT16 (not FAT32) - 1Gb. Then install NT on the 2nd partiton using NTFS - 1Gb
Under 98, create a FAT32 partitons for your games/soft. Under NT, create a NTFS partition for your pgms.
I guess the Altas is at least 9Gb ?

Tell me, how's your HD re speed ?
Could you post some benchmarks ? WinTune98 1.0.39 will do.
Thanks in advance

Stan

[Stan]

[deleted duplicated post]

[This message has been edited by Stan (edited 08-26-99).]

[Moe]

Well, 98 and NT are separated by partition. Each has it's own FAT16 partition. I dunno, i think if i completely shut down the system, the problem doesn't happen as often, but if i just restart it is more frequent.

Still, at least everything is in one piece! No big deal, just wondering if it was something that was common.

As far as benchmarks, yes i shall post some for you, and yes, the drive is 9gb.

Thanks again, Stan. The benchmarks shall be posted shortly.

[Moe]

ok here are the benchmarks, tell me what you think, i'm not sure what to make of many of these.

Summary
Intel Celeron A
(2) 560 MHz
Windows NT 4.0.1381 Service Pack 5
NVidia Riva 128
1024x768@16bits/pixel
3279±0.78(0.024%) MIPS (Integer operations)
1333±0(0%) MFLOPS (Floating point operations)
223±17(7.6%) (Integer application simulation)
293±1(0.34%) (Floating point application simulation)
238±14(6.3%) (MMX application simulation)
57±0.44(0.76%) Video MPixels/s
42±0.031(0.074%) OpenGL MPixels/s
53±2.3(4.3%) Direct3D MPixels/s
970±4.9(0.5%) RAM MB/s
212±2.7(1.3%) cached disk MB/s
4.2±0.026(0.62%) uncached disk MB/s

System Details

BIOS: v1.0 06/08/99
Bus: PCI,PCI,PNP BIOS,ISA
APM:
Possible 'hog' apps running: (none)
Other apps running: Current test status; DDHelpWndClass; comsmd; LoadWC

CPU Details

CPU load: 0
low MIPS: 1200
CPUID: 0x0665 0x183FBFF
MMX Present: True
3DNow Present: False
Streaming SIMD Extensions Present: False
Processor Serial Number Present & Enabled: False
dhrystone time (s): 1.2
whetstone time (s): 0.015
Integer time (s): 7.2
Floating point time (s): 4.9
MMX time (s): 8.5

Video Details

AccOpt: Normal
Total video time (s): 10
Window open time (s): 0.011
Text scroll time (s): 1.2
Line drawing time (s): 1.6
Filled objects time (s): 0.59
Pattern blit time (s): 1.4
Text draw time (s): 0.46
DIB blit time (s): 5.6
Window close time (s): 0.048

OpenGL Details

Time (s): 2.1

Direct3D Details

DirectX Version 300
Time (s): 5.5

Memory Details

Memory Read Speed (MB/s): 1102
Memory Write Speed (MB/s): 1012
Memory Copy Speed (MB/s): 795
Installed RAM (MB): 256
Free RAM (MB): 213
Memory used (%): 0
Page File Driver: 32-bit
Total Page File (MB): 505
Free Page File (MB): 469
Read speed, 4 KB blocks, MB/s: 2096
Read speed, 8 KB blocks, MB/s: 2105
Read speed, 16 KB blocks, MB/s: 2062
Read speed, 32 KB blocks, MB/s: 1158
Read speed, 64 KB blocks, MB/s: 1159
Read speed, 128 KB blocks, MB/s: 1123
Read speed, 256 KB blocks, MB/s: 330
Read speed, 512 KB blocks, MB/s: 328
Read speed, 1024 KB blocks, MB/s: 329
Read speed, 2048 KB blocks, MB/s: 328
Write speed, 4 KB blocks, MB/s: 2657
Write speed, 32 KB blocks, MB/s: 1061
Write speed, 256 KB blocks, MB/s: 161
Write speed, 2048 KB blocks, MB/s: 133
Copy speed, 4 KB blocks, MB/s: 2306
Copy speed, 32 KB blocks, MB/s: 687
Copy speed, 256 KB blocks, MB/s: 89
Copy speed, 2048 KB blocks, MB/s: 86

Disk Details

Disk Last Scanned: 12:00:00 AM
Disk Last Optimized: 12:00:00 AM

Cached Disk, 128 blocks
Open file time (s): 0.00072
Sequential write time (s): 0.0048
Sequential read time (s): 0.016
Random write time (s): 0.00029
Random read time (s): 0.0011
Close file time (s): 0.00046
Open file bytes: 1024
Sequential write bytes: 524288
Sequential read bytes: 4194304
Random write bytes: 65536
Random read bytes: 262144
Close file bytes: 1024
Open file MB/s: 1.4
Sequential write MB/s: 104
Sequential read MB/s: 257
Random write MB/s: 218
Random read MB/s: 219
Close file MB/s: 2.1

Uncached Disk, 2048 blocks
Open file time (s): 0.00072
Sequential write time (s): 0.75
Sequential read time (s): 0.38
Random write time (s): 1.9
Random read time (s): 1.3
Close file time (s): 0.00052
Open file bytes: 1024
Sequential write bytes: 8388608
Sequential read bytes: 8388608
Random write bytes: 1048576
Random read bytes: 1048576
Close file bytes: 1024
Open file MB/s: 1.4
Sequential write MB/s: 10
Sequential read MB/s: 20
Random write MB/s: 0.53
Random read MB/s: 0.78
Close file MB/s: 1.9

[toms111]

That sucker ought to really flip the cards if you win a game of Solitaire!

[Moe]

Hehe, never was any good at solitare. It'll pull some mean multi-tasking though. NT is supposed to be slower, in general, than 9x. But on this system, it's faster.

So what does anyone make of those hd benchmarks?? I compared them online to others and the only one I saw that was significantly faster was a RAID array.

[Stan]

Hi Moe !

Well, a couple of months ago, I installed a RAID IDE sub-system in my machine. It is the Promise FastTrack RAID controller with 2 IBM 9.1 Gb 22Gxp (2Mb cache, 7200 rpm) in RAID 0 config.

According to several tests, this disk sub-system is faster than a single IBM 9LZX with Adaptec U2W controller.

For the all story, check this link:
http://www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/001130.html

Stan